Welcome again to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets e-newsletter. It’s broadly based mostly on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, however free, and made for your weekend studying. Want it in your inbox each Saturday? Sign up here.
Happy Saturday, everybody. I do hope that you’re in good spirits and in good well being. I’m studying to nap, one thing that has change into a requirement in my life after I spotted that the information cycle isn’t going to decelerate. And as a result of my accomplice and I adopted a third dog who likes to rise up early, please be a part of me in making napping cool for adults, in order that we are able to all relaxation up for Vaccine Summer. It’s almost right here.
On work subjects, I have a couple of issues for you at this time, all regarding knowledge factors that matter: Q1 2021 M&A knowledge, March VC outcomes from Africa, and a few shocking (to me, at the least) podcast numbers.
On the first, Dan Primack shared a couple of early first-quarter knowledge factors via Refinitiv that I wished to cross alongside. Per the monetary knowledge agency, world M&A exercise hit $1.three trillion in Q1 2021, up 93% from Q1 2020. U.S. M&A exercise reached an all-time excessive in the first quarter, as nicely. Why can we care? Because the knowledge helps underscore just how sizzling the final three months have been.
I’m anticipating enterprise capital knowledge itself for the quarter to be equally spectacular. But as everyone seems to be noting this week, there are some cracks appearing in the IPO market, as the second quarter begins that would make Q2 2021 a really totally different beast. Not that the enterprise capital world will sluggish, particularly provided that Tiger just reloaded to the tune of $6.7 billion.
On the enterprise capital subject, African-focused knowledge agency Briter Bridges stories that “March alone saw over $280 million being deployed into tech companies operating across Africa,” pushed partially by “Flutterwave’s whopping $170 million round at a $1 billion valuation.”
The knowledge level issues because it marks the most lively March that the African continent has seen in enterprise capital phrases since at the least 2017 — and I might guess ever. African startups have a tendency to increase extra capital in the second half of the yr, so the March outcome will not be an all-time file for a single month. But it’s bullish all the identical, and helps feed our basic sentiment that the first quarter’s enterprise capital outcomes may very well be large.
And lastly, Index Ventures’ Rex Woodbury tweeted some Edison knowledge, particularly that “80 million Americans (28% of the U.S. 12+ population) are weekly podcast listeners, +17% year-over-year.” The enterprise capitalist went on to add that “62% of the U.S. 12+ population (around 176 million people) are weekly online audio listeners.”
As we discussed on Equity this week, the non-music, streaming audio market is being guess on by a bunch of gamers in gentle of Clubhouse’s success as a breakout client social firm in latest months. Undergirding the bets by Discord and Spotify and others are these knowledge factors. People love to pay attention to different people discuss. Far greater than I might have imagined, as a music-first individual.
How good it’s to be again in a time when client investing is neat. B2B is nice however not all the things might be enterprise SaaS. (Notably, nevertheless, it does seem that Clubhouse is struggling to hold onto its own hype.)
Look I can’t sustain with all the rattling enterprise capital rounds
TechCrunch Early Stage was this week, which went slightly nicely. But having an occasion to assist placed on did imply that I lined fewer rounds this week than I might have appreciated. So, listed below are two that I might have typed up if I had had the spare hours:
- Striim’s $50 million Series C. Goldman led the transaction. Striim, pronounced stream I consider, is a software program startup that helps different firms transfer knowledge round their cloud and on-prem setups in actual time. Given how lively the knowledge market is at this time, I presume that the TAM for Striim is deep? Quickly flowing? You can provide a greater stream-centered phrase at your leisure.
- Kudo’s $21 million Series A. I lined Kudo final July when it raised $6 million. The firm offers video-chat and conferencing companies with help for real-time translation. It had a very good COVID-era, as you’ll be able to think about. Felicis led the A after participating in the seed spherical. I’ll see if I can extract some recent progress metrics from the firm subsequent week. One to watch.
And two extra rounds that you just additionally might have missed that you shouldn’t. Holler raised $36 million in a Series B. Per our personal Anthony Ha, “[y]ou may not know what conversational media is, but there’s a decent chance you’ve used Holler’s technology. For example, if you’ve added a sticker or a GIF to your Venmo payments, Holler actually manages the app’s search and suggestion experience around that media.”
I really feel previous.
And in case you aren’t paying sufficient consideration to Latin American tech, this $150 million Uruguayan round ought to assist set you straight.
Various and varied
Finally this week, some excellent news. If you’ve learn The Exchange for any size of time, you’ve been pressured to learn me prattling on about the Bessemer cloud index, a basket of public software program firms that I deal with with oracular respect. Now there’s a brand new index on the market.
Meet the Lux Health + Tech Index. Per Lux Capital, it’s an “index of 57 publicly traded companies that together best represent the rapidly emerging Health + Tech investment theme.” Sure, that is branded to the extent that, akin to the Bessemer assortment, it’s tied to a specific focus of the backing enterprise capital agency. But what the new Lux index will do, as with the Bessemer assortment, is monitor how a specific enterprise agency is itself monitoring the public comps for his or her portfolio.
That’s a helpful factor to have. More of this, please.
